


Dust

by silverpenknife



Category: Hotline Miami (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Death Wish, Gen, Post-Canon, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22828168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverpenknife/pseuds/silverpenknife
Summary: "I’m not afraid of dying."
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Dust

“I’m not afraid of dying.”

The Son’s body lay broken on the ground. And the Son—whatever he was now—stared at it, the unimpressed audience to a curtain’s fall. It no longer held any interest to him.

This was not like the deaths of his father and grandfather and family bodyguard. He felt nothing. After they’d gone, this was the one thing he had wanted. He didn’t really care if he lived or died, and on the nights where he laid awake in his empty bedchamber, it was this that scared him most.

He’d been living life hoping that someday it would lead him to death. To the same place they had gone—a place where he could give up like they had given up, to leave the living still in the world and move on to confront the sins of his life. A part of him wanted to see what whatever God there was made of him—how it would judge the life he had lived.

The question nagged at him, an itch that he couldn’t help but scratch until it bled. How much could he do before God decided that enough was enough? How many people could he kill for the sake of power, before it became his turn to leave the world, as easily as a gunshot through flesh? He wouldn’t fight it when it came.

He probably deserved it, anyway.

* * *

_Lebedev number three_ , they’d called him, and it perfectly encapsulated everything he loved and hated about the legacy he’d been left. _He’s one crazy motherfucker_.

Maybe they thought that when they saw him leaning over them, his sword dripping careless red over their bloodied faces, the scar on his face gleaming like a brand in the night and his own eyes burning into theirs. Maybe they questioned why he looked so haunted. His eyes were a nuclear meltdown in progress, with all of the fury and all of the things gone wrong, glitch after technical glitch stacked up until it became too much to bear.

 _One crazy motherfucker_. Did they think that of him?

But he thought it all the time, to himself.

He acted like he didn’t give a shit about how he was the same, and how he was different from his father. But after everything, after another job done—the high of fresh blood spraying over his blade, his suit, coating his skin like a warm glove—he’d lock himself in his office and clean the sword and return it to the sheath where she had always kept it. And then he’d ask the ghost of his father whether this was what he wanted.

It was irrational of him. His family needed him to lead and lead well, to bring what remained of their organization to glory. But what did it matter, anyway? They were all dead. The Son could squander the fortune they passed on, could bring the Mafia to ruin, and in the end nobody would pay for it but himself. After his father’s death, the city was _his_.

And he couldn’t even enjoy it because as fearless as he was, deep down there was a part of him that was still a child with fingers too scrawny to fit in brass knuckles, believing that he would have years yet before the Lebedev family legacy caught up to him.

He should have known that in their business, nothing came for granted.

He should have known. Should have been better, maybe _should have saved them_ —but those were the thoughts of a hero in a fairy tale, and he wouldn’t fool himself into thinking he even came close. There was nothing he could do, least of all something to save them _from_. Not when his father had taken his own life—not when his father’s deeds had always been his father’s to bear.

But the Son took one look at himself and felt like laughing. That wasn’t really true, was it?

He kept himself awake with the rush of immediacy and adrenaline, and below that with the reminder that he had to, that this was his _duty_ , his _family_ , his _birthright_. He despised and resented it—regretted it, even. In the end he’d hoped there was another way. Maybe if things hadn’t turned out the way they did, he could still be the person he was.

* * *

The day he returned to his father’s villa to find the police there and the corpses of his men, his family members, blood and brains sprayed all over the white marble and luxurious carpets, something in him snapped.

He’d had two years to steel himself for his duty. To stop being the person he had been—to put on the white suit jacket over the pale blue shirt, stand before his men, and grin like the world was ending and he’d caused it. Maybe it was even true. He had the skill to kill men before they could lift a weapon, the money to hire people to dispose of them in his stead, and enough resources that he could keep them wishing they were dead in every living moment.

The men looked back at him with fear. With the attacks of the masked vigilantes and the loss of their leaders, he knew they doubted that a child could rule. But the rage hit him with the force of a tsunami, crashing, burning, ever-present tides wrested to a peak.

With anger came a sort of calming resolve. The emptiness in him had finally coalesced.

He was the Son, he’d told himself, and he’d suffered enough to have no fear. He cared about nothing in this world anymore, not as deeply as he’d loved his family, and his business, and his childish hope for a future, before everything had come to this.

It didn’t matter any longer, why he was doing it. With losing everything came complete freedom. He could walk into a building crawling with armed mobsters and emerge the only one standing because nothing remained to hold him back. The moment he met his death, he knew he would have no regrets. No one would regret his death either. That meant he could live to please himself and himself alone.

How ironic.

* * *

He was never truly happy. There was a black hole in his life, and it ate everything that could have mattered out of his hands.

At the very bottom of it all, the hole wasn’t in him. The hole was all around him, and he was the one who didn’t belong in this world.

He was, in plain words, the sole survivor of a massacre. He remained, standing alone, left to forever wonder why only he had lived, and not one of the others.

The hole was waiting for him, its pull as irresistible as a black hole. The day he returned to the place he belonged, the world would be in order again. And at the same time that he wished so desperately to get it over with, some self-aware part of him fought against what he’d become.

He thought that maybe all along, he’d just been really fucking angry.

Anger made people do some crazy things. Crazy enough to rewind the clock on a crumbling empire, and stand in front of the leveled guns of fifteen Colombians, and emerge the only one alive. Maybe there was some truth to the words of those mobsters, after all.

Then again, why did he still care about them? They were long dead. His men had dumped their bodies in tubs of acid to decompose—everything left of them was surely destroyed, unrecognizable now.

Wasn’t it funny that he lived his life in the hands of some words said by dead men? What did he even live for that still moved, and breathed, and changed—that hadn’t left him all alone in this rotting world, a ghost of the dreams of others?

The greatest dreams were always left behind by those who could no longer take them back. They spread themselves, like a plague, from the bodies of the dead to the living. Undeniable and unattainable—dreams ruled the world like gods. People martyred themselves for the echoes dead men left behind, and deep in their graves under the earth, they were probably laughing.

Maybe that was why the world was so _wrong_. Because people kept trying to fit the wishes of the dead into a world that only had space for the living, until the entire world was more silent void and still heartbeat than it contained motion, breathing, and joy. If only people could let old wounds lie undisturbed. Eventually, those craters in the earth might heal over if everyone stopped trying to open them back up.

Wasn’t it better to let their hopes and their wishes die alongside their bodies? No human could achieve immortality. Had working for the legacy of his father been no different from living with the man’s bloody corpse rotting in his office, dug up from the earth where it should belong?

The Son’s problem was that he could never let go. It hadn’t been enough for his hopes to merge with those of others, intertwine and dwell together, symbiotic. Instead, he’d lost himself to them. The things he wanted were usurped, subsumed into the hungering void. And there was no one left to change that inside him.

Now, there was no more laughing as he shot at trash bags in the alley after he’d stolen his father’s assault rifle. No more reading novels or practicing his punches with the family bodyguard. Instead there was only one choice: to abandon his childish dreams and make something out of the nothing he’d been left. The road forward would be endless and hard and lonely. Long before any of the Colombians’ men could get to him, the weight of the dreams on his back threatened to destroy.

Back then, all the drinking and drugs hadn’t appealed to him like they did in the two years before today. He’d taken up the habit because he preferred something—anything—over sitting in silence and contemplating the cruelty of fate. He wanted to forget, and at the same time, _couldn’t_. For so many reasons, he couldn’t. They forced him to continue on, a pawn of ghostly hands, marching the long road covered in neon blood.

Why had it mattered so much to them?

Why had it mattered so much to him?

And fuck, he’d been so _angry_ —

It was all emptied now.

Spent in the broken angle of his neck; in the splinters of his bones cracked to a fine dust, white like pearls against his bloody flesh; in the pool of red that blossomed like a summer rose where he’d splattered into a million pieces on the black asphalt.

* * *

Now he stood in the hole under the world, and when he looked up at the city of fluorescent lights and crimson summers that sprawled far above him, he understood that everything was empty inside. He’d killed all those people because he wanted to and needed to and didn’t see any other way out. History was history. It couldn’t be changed.

In the end, here were his right-hand man and the masked vigilantes and the corrupt detective—all of them plummeting, whether aware or unaware, toward the same doom. Who deserved to win out of all of them? The answer was none of them. There was no victory here, not one that mattered once after its perpetrators had crumbled away.

From the moment he was born, he’d known deep inside that this was how he would end. He sold himself to the neon blood and the void of scintillating city lights, and was repaid accordingly.

“I’m not afraid of dying.”

He said it again, his ghost-voice a whisper of cold wind in the gap between two buildings, and it was true. There was nothing to fear here.

No hell or heaven awaited him—only the choices he’d made and could not change.

He’d been falling all his life.

Finally— _finally_ —he’d reached the bottom.

**Author's Note:**

> [(humming)](https://youtu.be/vsZtCLMsevM)


End file.
